"The
transfer from stage to film doesn't always go
smoothly, as it's hard to shake the film's
theater roots."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Nicholas Hytner's ("Center Stage"/"The
Crucible"/"The Madness of King George") adaptation of
Alan Bennett’s Broadway Tony Award-winning play is set
in Cutler's Grammar School in Yorkshire, a
middle-class boys’ school in northern England, in 1983
(it's the British counterpart of an American public
high school). Hytner also directed the hit play with
the same cast and script in both London and on
Broadway. It focuses on a group of eight working-class
students, all of them a bit crass but recognized as
bright by their zealous, pompous and snooty
results-orientated headmaster (Clive Merrison).

The transfer from stage to film doesn't always go
smoothly, as it's hard to shake the film's theater
roots. The film offers witty but unbelievable dialogue
for an eighteen-year-old; but it admirably gives voice
to rally around the flag of imagination to inspire the
student body instead of being mired in traditional
rigidity and dullness. Yet the broad comedy never is
funny and its crafty attempt at wordplay seems
self-defeating when the featured students are not
really sympathetic figures, as they cram to get into
the elite schools of Oxford and Cambridge. The group
of eight are so impudent and most seem like soulless
show-off brainy types, that I never took an interest
in their ambitious struggle especially when they never
really had much to say that didn't seem thin.

Two different styled teachers--the aging, obese,
gay, motorcycle riding, romantic, unorthodox French
and literature teacher Mr. Hector (Richard Griffiths)
and the pragmatic, cynical and nerdy younger recent
Oxford grad temp teacher Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell
Moore) who has been brought in to teach how to pass
the entrance exam, vie for the affections of the
students. Hector speaks for poetry, movies, pop
culture and learning for its own sake, while
smarty-pants Irwin speaks for career opportunities,
boldness and beating the college game by being cunning
and opportunistic and knowing how to put on a good
performance. They each make good points and the
students give them both their full attention. Though
Hector gropes the students and is sometimes
misunderstood, he gives his all in teaching and years
later he's the "real" teacher students will fondly
remember for inspiring them. This comes out when the
third teacher who inspired the boys, the dedicated
droll-humored, no-nonsense, master history teacher,
Mrs. Dorothy Lintott (Frances de la Tour), relates at
the film's last scene what happened in later years to
the boys.

Dakin (Dominic Cooper) is the cocky handsome leader
of the eight privileged students ready to move up the
social ladder; he has the hots for the headmaster’s
alluring secretary Fiona (Georgia Taylor) and knows
how to use his good looks to attract both male
teachers. Also in love with Dakin is the misfit, gay,
nerdy, Jewish fellow student Posner (Samuel Barnett).
The overweight Timms (James Corden) is the class
clown; Rudge (Russell Tovey) is the oafish jock who is
only there to satisfy his working-class dad; Scripps
(Jamie Parker) is the gabby Christian; Akhtar (Sacha
Dhawan) registers as the group's Muslim and the one
other minority student, Crowther (Samuel Anderson), is
noteworthy only because he's black.

Bennett's satire takes aim on the Thatcher values
that push for a results-oriented society, which is
similar to Reagan's government ushering in the cynical
era of greed. The film in an adult way cleverly
waltzes around the theme that public British schoolboy
homo-eroticism cannot be ignored because it's alive
and well and does a decent job showing that gay
students and teachers are no better or worse than
straights. Which is not a profound statement, but
considering the current homophobic climate that
springs up much too often in American society it's
something that has to be said. It also tells us that
history is just something that happens and that no
teacher can ever make it completely sensible. My
problem was not in the so-called subversive call for
teaching to be allowed to go 'out of the box' if it's
done with a love for reaching the students' best
instincts, but that the film never lived up to what it
was preaching and was clumsily and mechanically
presented--hardly inspiring as a work of art, more
like a sermon to the choir. It's watchable because
Richard Griffiths, who absolutely stole Withnail and I
(1986), does the same here with an engaging mega
performance as the inspired teacher most people would
have liked to have had during their schooldays.